♪ Bob and Brad ♪ ♪ The two most famous physical
therapists on the Internet ♪ - Hi, folks, Brad Heineck,
physical therapist. - Hi, I'm Chris the Pharmacist. - And I'm exactly one half of the most famous physical
therapists on the Internet. - In your opinion, of course! - That's right, but today
we are fortunate enough to have Bob off and
Chris the Pharmacist on, we've got a very serious subject to cover, we probably won't get,
that'll be the humor probably for the whole video.
- I think that's the extent of it.
- Exactly right, the title of the video is Fibromyalgia, have pain, fatigue,
brain fog, memory loss, those are all typical symptoms, we're gonna go through
four steps to success to help manage and overcome these problems associated with this syndrome. Before we go any farther, we
do wanna get a little business out of the way, though. We do have a giveaway today and it happens to be a mattress! Now this mattress can
be a wonderful advantage for sleep, we're gonna talk
about that in a little bit but can you pull the sign up, Chris? - You betcha.
- See, I normally pull the sign up. There we go, for the giveaway,
if you wanna get into winning one of these mattresses, go to BobandBrad.com, go
to the Giveaway section and you'll see what you need to put in to get on it, you can
also go to the Facebook and at the top of the page, it is pinned, check that out. Also we are on Twitter,
Instagram, as well as - - The TikTok!
- The TikTok, that's right. - There we go.
- And a podcast as well are going in full force, we've
got some excellent people that we've interviewed and
sometimes, us ourselves Chris and I have been on some podcasts, so check it out. Let's get on to fibromyalgia, let's take the mattress and we'll get that out of the way. Fibromyalgia is a very
painful, debilitating condition and if you have it, you've been diagnosed, you're very well aware of this. It's oftentimes in some
specific parts of the body, across, I'm not gonna
go through the points 'cause I do have 'em mapped out, the most common locations in the body, but typically the upper
back and the chest, around the hips and waist,
and I may be missing some that you may be suffering from
but it's a chronic condition goes on and it's really life-changing. So, we have done research on it, we've both had patients over the years that have this and we came
up with a four step guide that you can vary from,
because everyone does not treat fibromyalgia in the same manners, it's not a cookie cutter thing. Chris, do you wanna step in
so I can quit talking so much? - Yeah, no, I mean,
fibromyalgia, it's, you know, it's not even really a disease state, it's much more of syndrome, I mean, so, when we think about it, it's
many many different things and oftentimes, when
patients have the diagnosis of fibromyalgia, you know, it's
arrived almost backhandedly like a process of exclusion so doctors who, you know, it
takes average of five years just to hit the diagnosis in most cases. And you're talking about, you
know, two to three percent of the population, about 70-90% women, so I mean, some unique
facts about fibromyalgia and you know, really,
oftentimes when they come in they present with pain and
they just don't know why, but you know, the doctors try and, there's not a set test for it either, which makes it so darn
frustrating to diagnose as a clinician and it makes
it really, really hard on the patient, 'cause they're
just waiting for an answer! I think, so many times
when we get an answer it's nice to start to turn the
page and work on the healing process, you know, and
that's what's so darn hard. So you know, your doctor will rule out other arthritis form conditions, I mean, you'll see strange things
that pop up like IBS, inflammatory bowel syndrome.
- IBS? - Inflammatory bowel syndrome.
- Oh, absolutely, yeah. - So, basically, you know,
constipation, diarrhea-type dominant side effects with a lot of pain in the tummy and you
know, with that respect, you know, you're like,
well, we treat one thing. I mean, are we looking for an elephant and it should be a giraffe kind of thing, and they just don't know where
it goes, well, I still have these symptoms, but you
know, I'm hurting here, hurting there, I'm in pain
for every second of the day from the moment I wake up to
the point where I go to bed and then, you know, your
friends and family will be like why are you always hurting all the time and you know, so ultimately
when they get the diagnosis then I think the healing can begin and then I think we have lots of things that we can kind of start to share to try and help to make sure, it's not a hopeless
condition, it's something that we can go into remission,
and we can move forward and have very happy effective lives so there's lots of good
things that we can do to help people.
- Right, and it's, that can be the challenging part. I did want to mention, as far as from a therapy
standpoint, when I look at it with people, is part of the
explanation of the pain, there's, you know, these
muscles will tighten up in these painful areas and when a muscle tightens up, there's less circulation because
the muscle's tightened up like a ball, a real knotted
area and blood cannot circulate in that near as well as a relaxed muscle, it's like a sponge, it
can absorb the blood and the nutrients and the
oxygen that fresh blood provides and we wanna get rid of the waste products and that's kind of a,
you may not have heard that term, thinking of in your muscles but the waste products
being carbon dioxide, lactic acid, and these
things when they build up create that pain in that, so,
getting to be able to relax can be a big part of this, but
we're gonna talk about that a little bit more, so again, oh, the point I wanted to bring up, Chris, is this is kind of like back pain, although it's different, in the way that you look normal. I mean, there's no, it's not
like you have a broken arm you look healthy, but you've got this pain that the average person
is not familiar with it, who's ignorant of fibromyalgia, they don't understand.
- No, I mean, and that's one of the biggest,
I think one of the biggest tragedies of fibromyalgia is
we all look perfectly normal if we're suffering from
it, except for the fact that we're not, because
we're feeling so miserable and what we think is that it
was probably brought on by, you know, it could have
been a stress event, a traumatic event, so whether
it's a car accident, stress, an infection, so you
know, we don't really know that nexus event that caused it and we know that it runs in families so we don't really know but
what we think we understand right now is it seems
to be nerve transmission is the problem so if you
think of your nervous system as a series of highways,
something's not right with that and when we talk about the pain points and you know, there's at least 18 of 'em, I think that they look at pretty routinely but I think there may be
others as you alluded to but what happens is is that
let's say we're listening to the radio and we like
it loud, we're rocking out, we're driving, it's on ten, well, your pain, if you have
fibromyalgia, is easily an 11 or higher, so it goes beyond that and just simple things like
if you went in for a massage or you know, you just
hit your arm on a door in one of those tender spots, it puts you through the roof and so it's, and it's not
a normal response, like, for anybody else it gets, you
know, it's just a little slap and you're like, why did
you almost wanna drop to your knees or actually
have tears in your eyes. You know, and it's a very real pain. I mean, it doesn't, just
because it doesn't look bad, it's bad.
- Right. - And so you know we go through
a lot of different things to treat these and we'll jump into those as we go forward.
- So what I did, I went to, I wanted to
find a, 'cause, you know, I'm not a fibro specialist. So I went to Adrian Lau,
he's a physical therapist, he's got his PhD in pain, he treats people with fibromyalgia on a regular basis and he does research and
he has dedicated his life to pain, people with chronic pain. We've had him on our show
actually, he lives in Iowa not too far from here.
- Yeah, right down the way. - Yeah, and he's just
a heck of a nice guy, you can just tell he
is, life is, you know, this is his passion. So he does have a book
specifically for fibromyalgia, he has 'em for other
chronic ailments as well, painful ailments, the name of his book is "Your Fibromyalgia Workbook", it's not, it's made for the layperson so - - Yeah, it's made for everybody! - So you go through, but one of the things I wanted to bring it down into, and I heard this from him
and I got this from him, break it down to the most simplest areas to address for pain
and so there was sleep, okay, you've gotta -
- Critical. - Yeah, as opposed to going
after this painful condition as a whole, break it down into four. One is sleep, the next one
is understand your pain, try to get a better
understanding of why it, you know, because people come out with, after they see the doctor,
maybe someone else, they say, well, they think
it's just all in my head which is the farthest from the truth and you're not gonna progress
if you don't understand it a little bit better and he does a really good
job, I've watched some, you know, talking to him on his videos or his way to communicate
that to the patient is really good, as
opposed to coming across in a real technical manner, he comes across in a personal manner so you can relate to it. And then exercise or motion,
I'm gonna show you a little, a way to work into
movement 'cause most people with fibromyalgia don't wanna move because it hurts.
- No, the pain is so extreme. - Right, exactly, so it's
like, I know I should be moving but it hurts worse, so there's some ways to work through that and
then we are going to touch also on some diet at the end. We're not dieticians but we can
give some good general rules for that.
- Absolutely. - Did I miss one?
- No, I think, I think we'll start with
sleep and I think we'll move - - Yeah, let's, and
that's what Dr. Lau said, if you can get, take, get
your sleep under control that's half the battle right there. And it's not easy, 'cause we have people having problems with sleep without pain because of other issues. Do you wanna talk about some sleep - - Well, you know, we
can, I mean, you know, sleep is, you know, one of
the hallmarks of fibromyalgia is the fatigue and they're just, not only are they in pain all the time but they're always exhausted,
I mean, they're talking like just bone weary tiredness. So you're just dragging tail
every moment of every day and so how do we, how do you
fix that when you're sore, painful, tired, I mean, it's
just a very frustrating point so one of the things that we can do to try and gravitate towards better sleep, well, I always call it sleep
hygiene, but there's other ways of looking at it, but I
think that it's, you know, some basics with sleep that,
whether you have fibromyalgia or anything else, are just keys to getting a better night's rest, 'cause if we get a, everything
follows through from sleep in a lot of cases, so
if we can get the rest, our bodies begin to
heal, things calm down, you get some better, your nervous
system seems to settle out so we'll kind of see that as we talk but really the reality
of it is is to go to bed, you wanna have a nice, quiet setting, you want a dark, dark room, you wanna be putting away
your iPhones, your iPads, your laptops, probably don't
even wanna be watching TV because there's, your phones
and your iPads and computers reflect that blue light and
that's stimulating to the brain and that keeps us awake to begin with, which, ironically, is kind of strange, because a lot of people,
oh, I'm just relaxing, playing a little, you
know, keyboard sudoku or words with friends or whatever. - Even on your cell phone,
there's enough blue light to affect -
- Correct, you know, and some of 'em now have
recognized that, I know that with Apple they do have a dimming setting so it's certainly something
that I would encourage to take advantage of even as
you're approaching bedtime but would still encourage you for an, putting all the things away so that you're heading into
bed in a quiet, relaxed manner. So, we wanna have same set times, so you wanna have a same
bedtime and you wanna try and establish the same wake up time, too. - Sure, some consistency.
- So that you're getting a nice, round-the-clock chronologically, you just wanna have that same set time, I mean, ideally seven or eight hours. Some people need a little
bit more, so you know, you know your body and
you know what you need. But so you want that quiet time, I think white noise is
actually important for a lot of people because, and what
is white noise as well, well, it's not a color, but
it's just kind of weird, kind of a shh, kind of
noise so like a fan. - That's what we use, we just use a fan. - And it's actually,
there's lots of studies outside of this, what we're talking about, that actually shows that white
noise just relaxes the brain and when you look at the brain waves and the delta waves and all the things that they're looking at
with sleep, specifically, you just get a deeper level of sleep and so it does help to
promote that healthier sleep. And you know, you want
kind of a cool room, you don't want it real hot, so your body, as the temperature slows
down, heart rate slows down, you promote deeper sleep
so we head into REM, which is actually one of the
restorative parts for our brain but also our body, we're
learning, so there's a lot of fascinating things with sleep that oftentimes we take
for granted, really, because, eh, go to bed. - I just wanna say, I just read a book a few months ago by Sean
Stevenson, and it's about sleep. If you look up the author, Sean Stevenson, what is it, I can't remember, it's, the title is very
obvious it's about sleep. He had some really, the whole
book talks about things, one of the things, he was so
specific on having a dark room is if you need light to
be able to see your time, get it in red, if you need a nightlight, get a red nightlight
so you don't trip over, there's something about red
that does not produce the same, is it the melatonin in the brain. - Blue is stimulating
and red, red actually, it's interesting, 'cause
it doesn't throw off a lot of effect, so if
your partner is there too it doesn't annoy them, you know, it just doesn't reflect,
so that's why the military uses to read their maps
and things and that too. Lots of studies on those wavelengths. - Ah, I wanna get to the next number, understanding, some
understanding of the pain, but before we do that,
medication for sleep, that's your specialty?
- Yeah, well, I dispense it, it's not my specialty, but I can tell you a lot about them, but the reality of it is is
that sleep does not come easily to millions and millions of Americans and when you're talking
about three to five million Americans with fibromyalgia,
sleep is one of the things that's a challenge to achieve. So there's a lot of different
ways that we can approach falling asleep, we've talked
about some of the basic mechanistic things that we can do but sometimes we need pharmaceutical help. Not always, I mean,
sometimes it can be something as simple as melatonin, for some people, you can get it through
foods like raspberries or pineapple or cherries, so some people like that
because it's also gives you other healthful nutrients,
and it also helps to stimulate that sleep about
30 minutes before you wanna lay down, otherwise we
have to use medication so something like trazadone
which is an old-school anti-depressant, which isn't
much of an anti-depressant, but interesting with fibromyalgia, it has unique capabilities
because it works on some of those neurotransmitters
which we talk about fibromyalgia as being a
kind of a highway disorder where the nerves are firing improperly, it raises serotonin and some dopamine and norepi levels to try and
help to improve transmission but the benefit for people who can't sleep is that it just makes you doggone tired. And so it helps you to sleep
and get more fitful sleep. But there's other drugs that we can use, I mean, you know, like, the Z drugs, which we did a video about awhile back, so you talk about zolpadam
is probably one of the more common ones, but, azopiclone, and - - So, the big picture, drugs is, pharmaceuticals for sleep
is not gonna be a long-term. - No, we hope that you can
naturally do it on your own because there's really
no substitute for it. I mean, when it comes
down to pharmaceuticals, yeah, we're a society,
America is a society of better living through chemistry, but if we can do it without, it's best. And I'm telling you that as a pharmacist. But if you can, you can,
but if you can't, you can't, and those of you that know
that you just can't sleep, you understand it and you realize the need for these medications,
obviously your doctors do and they do a very good
job of trying to diagnose and they'll try and
mitigate where they can, it depends on the
circumstance, everybody's case of fibromyalgia specifically is different. So, if you had it and I had it, we'd have two totally different stories. - Yeah, I should have said this, you know, if sleep quality is not a problem, is not one of your biggest problems, you could probably skip this section, but it's probably part of it.
- No, it is, everything stems from that well, fitful night of rest. And that's one of the things that, and it's hard to achieve that, we have, that's why you wanna go into a pattern and that's why it's so important to, going forward, that if
we have this diagnosis of fibromyalgia that we learn to make some of these lifestyle changes so that we can go forward.
- Sure, yep. - So, for sure.
- Okay, so let's go on to the next topic,
understanding why you hurt. I know, from my point of
view, my understanding as far as the physical
part where I talked about tight muscles, we need to get 'em relaxed, so we get the blood flow, I'm gonna show you an exercise warm-up that actually you could
do before you go to bed, it may help your relax
so you can sleep better. But I think the best as
far as I'm concerned, my advice is to go to an
author like Adrian Lau, read some of his information, YouTube you know, his name,
see and listen to how they talk about these experts that have studied it and dedicated their life to it, I know one of the analogies
he talks about is, and it's a lot better coming from him but he talks about that
pain, you know it's there and it's so painful and
relates that to a lion coming into the room,
like if you get tapped and you have that pain, you
know, he says, you know, there's that big lion and
there's that fear response and he, if you can work it out so that that big lion coming in and
getting that flight or flight, help me out, fight -
- Fight or flight. - Fight or flight response,
if you can get that big lion down into a little cub.
- Sure. - So that that fight or
flight response settles down as well, and that's one
of those things that is easier said than done, again,
that's why from an expert it's gonna feel, he's
gonna make more sense than from me.
- Well, I think that's why his workbook is so important,
I think, for a lot of people. I think it gives nice easy-to-read steps that are going to allow them to relate to their day-to-day activities, and so, you know, one of the
things that they talk about also is cognitive behavioral
therapy, and it's kind of an understanding of the condition and I think the more we know, the more we can cope with things more
effectively and whether it's more of a CBT kind of, cognitive
behavioral therapy thing where we reach out and
we get that understanding for why we're hurting,
when we understand the why, and whether it's writing down some things within what Adrian has
done with the workbook, I mean, it definitely helps us, when we have that
understanding it allows us to accept it, make it become part of us and so we can face it more
easily without the fear and the frustration that
is associated with it. - I think, I do wanna also
mention, you, you said there was a patient of yours
that had chronic low back pain. - This was a chronic pain, but yes. - But he used Adrian, one of his books. - One of his workbooks,
specifically, and he completely is opioid free, now gotta
be close to eight years now, so and then he was a
strong, strong opioid user and he just knew that he
was to a point in his life where I can't keep doing
that, and he was actually having other subsequent side
effects as a result of that. - Sure.
- Which, you know, just to briefly touch on, you know, for fibromyalgia, there's
a lot of drug therapies that we do do, one of the, when I, over my career, I've
been doing this for 26 years, fibromyalgia just kind of
came out in the mid-90s when I started coming out of school and you know, one of the things, you know, doctors weren't quite, they just figured, well, we got this thing,
let's put this label on it, it's fibromyalgia and it's
pain, it's chronic pain, so what do we do? Well, we treat 'em with opioids. Well, we found out that
that is the last thing on Earth you want to do simply because they're addictive
and the reality of it is is what do pain medications
do, they just make you not care about the pain,
the pain is still there. So when we're treating
FM patients, you know, a lot of it's gonna come
down to sleeping well, we're gonna talk about
exercise and things like that shortly, but you know, the
medications that we rely on are gonna be anti-depressants
and maybe muscle relaxants, you know, so those are the
things that help to bridge and improve neuronal
transmission, that highway, so things like pre-gabalin,
things like Sevala, which is menilsopram, or things,
any of the antidepressants but duloxetine, or Cymbalta, specifically, are indicated directly for FM. - Sure, and so, what I wanna go, should we jump right into the, segue into the exercises? - Yeah, let's go to the exercises. - So, exercise, and Chris,
we've talked about this, as a pharmacist, you're saying exercise seems to be the way to go versus drugs. - Drugs, absolutely.
- And again, we talked about the pain gets worse with
exercise, so why do I wanna exercise, so I wanna show you, this is from a fibromyalgia patient, she was actually a doctor,
and I kind of modified it a little bit for my therapist background, before you exercise, and
I'm talking about exercise as simple as a mild walk,
which, that can really be uncomfortable, do the warm-up. The warm-up I'm gonna recommend - - Want me to hold that? - That's, I think it's going here. And this is one thing I do
with my back in the morning, I got spondylosthesis, if I try to warm up in a standing, weight-bearing
position, it is uncomfortable, it's not fun at all. So I lie down on my back
and it just changes the, your muscles are much more relaxed. Same with -
- Gravity. - Yep, exactly, so you
don't have to fight gravity, so, you're gonna lie down,
you can do this on your bed, it might be better on, you
know, a carpeted floor, it depends on how you
feel about getting down onto the floor or not, but
it's thing, you're gonna start out with a deep breath, everything should be quiet,
you know, you're not gonna have your dog licking your face or, you know, kids running around.
- That's gonna make a problem.
- Yeah, and take a deep breath two or three deep breaths, in
your nose and out your mouth and they talk about meditation,
if you can meditate, anything to allow the nervous system to settle down and relax, we're gonna start with the feet and probably shoes off,
I'm not gonna take mine off for the video, you can
do it with your shoes on and you're gonna do, you
know, five to ten ankle pumps, you can do more if you'd like, allow them, feet to relax,
get that circulation going, everything is relaxed,
you're gonna take your time and we're gonna go to
single knee-to-chest. And everything is just in slow motion, I'm gonna go down to two or
three motions for the video, you do as many repetitions
as you'd like to and let it go down slow, go to the other knee, and you may find one leg or one arm, when we get to the arms is more painful than the other, just
take your time with it, read your body, get used to it. Then we're gonna go both knees up and bring 'em up, help
it out, stretch here, get that low back and those
hips in the back, you'll feel those muscles, just
take your time with it. If it's too uncomfortable,
skip that stretch and go to the next one as we go on here. And then in this position, relaxing again and I call windshield wipers every time I have a patient
say, I say windshield wipers because I say hip rotations
and it doesn't make much sense. And it's like windshield
wipers going back and forth. If it's painful one
direction, don't go that way. Go the other direction a
few times and then bump in to the other painful direction,
and it may get better as a result of going the other direction. Do it as appropriate, as
your body allows, okay? The next thing we're
gonna do is we're gonna go up to the arms, and
here we're just gonna do shoulder flexion as
tolerated, if you wanna bring both hands together, if that
helps, that may be a thing to do if one arm is
weaker or has more pain let the other one help,
so it relaxes it more, whatever works out best for you, okay? These are the nice kind
of a pushup you can do with fibromyalgia is just,
I call 'em air pushups. I used to do these when I
was in karate just as part of a warm-up, and it was kind
of a fun way to do pushups. - Get those shoulders going.
- Yeah. Okay, and then I'll, like, snow angels, just bring your arms out to the side and bring 'em up as far
as you feel comfortable. Okay, and then we're gonna
go into the shoulders and squeeze the shoulder
blades back and down and then you can make
your circles, you know, if you don't feel
comfortable doing it this way you'll find out, we're
gonna get up and oftentimes people find it better in a
seated or standing position where you get those shoulders,
again, because a lot of the pain is gonna be
up in those shoulders and you need to relax and throughout this whole
thing we're always thinking about relaxed, deep
breathing, and then, you know, this might be a good warm up
for either bed or for going out and doing your walk or whatever
your exercise program is. What kind of exercise programs are there that you have
found in your research that - - Well, you know, it's
actually, it comes down to what you can commit to and what you enjoy, what makes you happy and so,
I mean, some of the things that, you know, when we have fibromyalgia and we're in that much
pain, you know, we wanna do something simple, so it might
just be a walk to the mailbox for your first go-round. And so, and then we just
progressively add to it and it's not to say that
you can't go out and enjoy weight lifting, aerobics,
kayaking, biking, swimming, hiking, I mean, there's just
so many things that you can do but we have to realize that we have to, kind of that, know thyself. You gotta know when you're overdoing it. So, and it might, you might
find as you, early on, particularly, you might not
know what you can get away with and what you can't and it
might set you back a few days. You know, it might be
something where, you know, yeah, we have a little bit
of mild soreness or stiffness from exercise like we've
all kind of experienced. The FM patients it can be
much more severe, really. I can't get out of bed,
that just smoked me. And so we want to ease
into it, so short walks, gradually building up, maybe
gradually building in intensity but when we start those
workouts, like, your warm up that you just showed, I think
could be done with just about anything, I think that would
probably apply to that, and then when we start,
you don't wanna start out sprinting right away, you
know, you start walking, maybe add a slight little jog if that's something that motivates you but just, yeah, maybe
it's mailbox to mailbox. - And that impact, I have a feeling, a lot of people, most
people don't like to jog. - No, and it doesn't have to
be, I mean, it can be yoga, it can be tai chi, and it's actually, they've done very
extensive studies on things like yoga and tai chi, because of this, and pilates, specifically.
- With fibro patients? - With fibro patients, specifically. They actually have an, they
actually show by the day, like, yoga in particular you
have these poses that we hold and such, they also
work on the flexibility, which does a phenomenal
job for those muscles which can, again, preaching
more in your church than I am mine, but -
- That's all right! - But at the same time,
they've shown to be very very effective. I think a lot of times, too,
you always hear the phrase misery loves company,
I think that, you know, look out for groups. A lot of places now, we
belong to the YMCA locally, where we go, and actually
within those organizations they have groups for
fibromyalgia patients. I would encourage you whether that's, let's say you're going to
Mike's Gym or whatever, see if they've got a fibro
board or just, where they have other people with like problems
where you can talk to people and see what worked for
them, how did they start, what helps them, maybe you can share your
experiences and a lot of times when we talk about things,
all of the sudden it's like okay, well, this worked
really well for Mike and I'm gonna try it. You know, and I think
there's some positivity - - Put some light at the end of the tunnel! - Yeah, put some positivity
on there and I think the one thing that we
have to know is, you know, if you accidentally overdid it, just realize that this is baby steps and we have to work towards a goal and that goal is getting back out there and not letting the disease
control, or the syndrome control our life, we're gonna take control and one of the biggest
things that we can do, number one, in my opinion
after sleep, I guess we'd call it number two, would be getting that proper exercise
'cause we need to help make those nerves and
muscles work together and when you're stronger
by even just simple things as walking or just,
yoga, pilates, tai chi, swimming, biking, whatever you choose, I think goes a long way to
helping improve those symptoms and also not only that,
when we fatigue the body, we sleep better at
night, so it all kind of falls back to sleep anyway. - And we did segue actually
into the, number four, on the four steps is
motivation, a reason for you to get up in the morning, you know, hopefully you can, if it's your job, I know there's one
woman, she was a farmer, and she had to get her work done and that worked out good for her 'cause she kept moving throughout the day to keep the farm going and she said, she was very, you know, that really helped manage her pain although she was still working on at the end of the day, she
was, it would come back to get her so that was
part of her next step was to get that aspect of
it so it's a 24 hour relief but still, it was a whole point, and I like what you're
talking about is, you know, to be around positive
people, support groups, what you read, you know,
from books like Adrian Lau and other people who are experts
or people who have written their success stories if they've had it. You know, if someone else
did it, maybe I can too. Gives you that light at
the end of the tunnel, so critical. Should we go onto the,
now this is number five, we put this in because we
wanted to just touch on it, and that's diet.
- Diet, that's - - We're not dieticians
or nutrition experts but we -
- Yes, nutrition is a critical component of
any health aspects anyways but actually eating well, one of the things with fibromyalgia maintaining a healthy body weight and you know, things like you know, we can get vitamin D through food, obviously it's gonna be
your sunshine vitamin, too, magnesium is an interesting
element but it seems to help with muscle functioning and
so it's gonna be your leafy green foods, you know -
- It's like, spinach - - Spinach and kale and
lettuce, romaine lettuce, because it's darker.
- The darker greens, yep. - Yeah, your darker greens, broccoli, I mean, there's, you know,
nuts, almonds, you know, there are actually, there's
lots of things that can be garnished, you know, legumes of any type unless you have like
certain allergies to things but we wanna be mindful of
that but I think, you know, lean protein, you know,
so you wanna find things that will help because that
helps with muscle restoration and building, you know, bone health. A lot of times, you know, and
I didn't touch on it heavily but most people with fibromyalgia have multiple other syndromes
or issues or disease states whether it's osteoarthritis, osteopenia, rheumatoid arthritis, IBS
we had talked about, so, nutrition comes into
play with all of those and so for helping, whether we're going like a gluten-free diet for some people seems to be a very effective choice, so taking the wheat out of
the equation, basically, so if we can do that, that
seems to be very beneficial, the lean proteins,
whether fishes, lean beef, grass-fed beef, that type of thing. - And I think this next
part we're talking about what we should eat and
what we shouldn't eat. Everyone is hearing this now,
stay away from those highly processed sugars.
- Oh, yeah, nothing in a box. I mean, it's just bad, they
have lots of other chemicals in there that just aren't
gonna really support what your body needs and
so when we give the body the right fuel, I think a lot
of other good things happen from that and gives us the
energy to sustain and be able to do the exercise programs,
you know, so all these things are very holistic and
kind of work together kind of like a big circle. You take something out, and
all of the sudden you have a leak in your circle, so to
speak, if it was holding water it'd have a leak. So they're all very very important aspects of treating fibromyalgia and so I think it's just critical to, and it's baby steps guys,
I mean, this is not easy for anyone and for the
people that are naive to fibromyalgia patients I
mean, just, do what you can to support 'em because
they need your help, they need your understanding, and you know, sometimes it's
just, it's hard to relate when you don't walk in
somebody else's shoes, it's really difficult to see
from another point of view but when they tell you, I
hurt, you know, don't just go ah, you're being a Sally. No offense to people named Sally, but, you know, at the same time, we
need to be respectful of that and support them and say,
well, how can I help? - Sure, exactly.
- And so maybe you can pick up the grocery bag for 'em, maybe you can grab the milk
from the grocery store, you know, just little things, it helps out quite a bit and I think
there's a lot of good things that we can learn. - All right, so one step at a time, don't try and tackle everything at once, look for everything you can, you're gonna find ways and
all of the sudden, something will say, oh, that's helping,
and then you get that point and we're gonna go to the next step and we really wish your
success and progress one step at a time to get through this. So, very good, from Brad
and Chris and Bob is also along with you on this
journey as well, thank you. - Thanks guys! (bright electronic note)
